How crazy is modern technology? Oakland author explores sensory enhancement in ‘We Have the Technology’

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Journalist Kara Platoni is photographed at her home on Monday, Dec. 21, 2015 in Oakland, Calif. Platoni is the author of the new book, "We Have the Technology: How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians & Scientists Are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time."

Just as the San Francisco museum’s hands-on experiments connect thousands of mind-bending science-y dots, Oakland author Kara Platoni melds complex concepts of biotech and human sensory enhancement in her new book, “We Have the Technology.” Subtitled “How Biohackers, Foodies, Physicians and Scientists are Transforming Human Perception, One Sense at a Time,” it shows us just how far modern technology has come — and how wild and crazy it’s going to get.

In more than 100 interviews during a year off from teaching at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, Platoni hung out in labs where chemists work to discover new tastes, interviewed medical researchers developing mind-controlled robotic limbs, tested virtual reality helmets used for treating post-traumatic stress disorder and tagged along to Radio Shack with basement biohack tinkerers — guys who implant electronic devices in their own bodies for enhanced sensory capabilities, sci-fi/superhero-style.

Why? Because they can.

“Humans are amazingly curious creatures. We’ve been doing this kind of thing for millennia, starting with fire and the spear, augmenting our ability to be more than just a naked ape,” says Platoni, a former science and tech reporter for the East Bay Express and other science publications.

“Now, it’s just more subtle,” she says. “We’re more intimately shaping how we experience the world around us — basically, how we perceive, and maybe manipulate, reality.” She cites wearable and virtual technology as a kind of middle ground right now, and “a lot of people are taking it beyond that. It’s all part of this continuum of humans wanting to be more.”

And this isn’t some far-off Star Trek tech for geeks only. It is already happening when, for example, we strap mini computers and sensors to our wrists in the form of Apple watches and Fitbits to access an infinite realm of instant data, and monitor and optimize bodily functions.

But in the world of biohacking, it’s not about just using tech, but embracing it — sometimes in your own body.

The book opens and closes with the guys of Grindhouse Wetware, a biohack collective based in Pennsylvania. They see technology as an opportunity to reach beyond our standard-equipment biological limits, and they are living quite literally on the cutting edge of cyber science.

“Their basic gambit is something like this: Open up your flesh, install a device and see if it can talk to your nervous system,” Platoni writes in the book. “If it can, you’ve broadened your sensory world without waiting for slow, clunky evolution to do it for you.”

Platoni displays photos on her laptop of a credit-card sized device glowing under the skin of one biohacker’s forearm. It’s a thermal sensor. Next, they plan to embed an electronic compass.

“Their thing is that other life forms on Earth have all these extra senses — sharks can sense electricity, snakes can see in infrared,” she says. “Why can’t humans do that, too?”

For the most part, at least in mainstream medicine and academia, Platoni says devices such as robotic arms and retinal implants are being developed only for serious medical needs — not just to turn us into Terminator or Iron Man.

And she makes a distinction between the “hard hacking” of implanting actual devices and what she calls “soft hacking” — such as the more subtle technologies of language, social influence and various kinds of sensory therapies that alter our perceptions of the world around us.

For her chapter on “taste,” she visited a lab in Denver where chemists search for a distinct category of taste for fatty acids — something beyond sweet, sour, salty or umami. With a nose clip blocking the smell, she “tasted” samples of fat. “I thought it was awful,” she says, laughing and making a face. “But how do you describe awful? Trying to describe the indescribable — if you don’t have a word for it, if you don’t have a mental construct, you can’t communicate it to others and fully share your perception of it.”

For smell, she went to a hospital in Paris where researchers are using scents to help people with Alzheimer’s recover memories. For the section on pain and emotion, she interviewed scientists who have discovered mind/body similarities between the pain of a broken bone and the pain of a broken heart.

When hitting a roadblock of confidentiality laws trying to find patients involved in the research, she came up with a simple solution: “I thought I’d better find some other kinds of therapists. So I went to bartenders,” she says. “Their patrons were all very cool about being pestered about their love lives.”

Platoni has long been energized by what she calls the “Nancy Drew beat” — writing about mysteries and adventures in science.

“And with all the things going on in Bay Area science — robotics, exoskeletons, brain stuff and wearable tech — it got me thinking, ‘Where is all this going?’ It seemed to be centered around the idea of perception.”

Her book, just out in early December, has already received high praise, especially for her deft and often humorous storytelling approach to such complex concepts. New York Magazine says she eschews “both the glib hyperbole of techno-futurists and the finger-wagging of neo-Luddites.”

Adam Rogers, articles editor at Wired in San Francisco, also applauds her work.

“Kara did a great job with this. I really respect her ability to dance between the worlds of the scientists, the amateurs and the professionals and bring it all together with the immediacy of stuff that’s going on right now,” he says. “She clearly realizes this (biotech) is where the action is.”